Page 27 of Stolen
‘She wasn’t on her own! All the bridesmaids followed Sian and Marc down the aisle together, and then all the guests went back in a big group. It was awedding!’
‘But you didn’t go find her once you got to the reception?’
‘She’s a really smart little girl,’ I say, and even to my own ears I sound defensive. ‘She doesn’t need me checking in on her every five minutes.’
And then Bates asks me what I was doing in the crucial window between 18.33, when Flic Everett took that last photo of Lottie, and 22.28, when the police logged the first phone call reporting her missing.
I tell her the truth: I was having sex on the beach with a stranger.
It didn’t take long: we took advantage of the privacy afforded by the hooded sunloungers, and Ian was an athletic lover. I orgasmed twice, in hard, sharp succession, before Ian came with a grunt of his own. Twenty minutes, start to finish.
We spent another twenty minutes, half-an-hour at most, gazing up at the stars and talking. I was away from the party less than an hour.
I’m not ashamed of the sex: I’m single, with as much right as any man to enjoy a fling with no strings attached.
But I’m also a mother, and it’s clear to everyone in the room I prioritised myself over my daughter. I didn’t go and find her once the wedding was over because I was too busy drinking champagne and flirting with a stranger.
Even if I had nothing to do with her disappearance, I’m culpable.
‘What do you know about Ian Dutton?’ Lorenz asks.
‘He’s a friend of Marc’s. I’d never talked to him before last night.’
‘Was it his idea to go to the beach?’
‘No, mine.’
I stare at the photograph of Lottie lying between us on the table. ‘Ian couldn’t have had anything to do with this,’ I say. ‘He was with me when she disappeared.’
‘You’re assuming only one individual is responsible,’ Bates says.
Her words conjure images I don’t want in my head. Sex trafficking rings, paedophile circles, men working in concert to spirit children away to dark basements and stained mattresses.
‘I understand why you have to ask these questions,’ I say, trying to hold my voice steady. ‘But I didn’t hurt Lottie, and nor did any of our friends. I told you about that man I saw talking to her on the beach. Have you checked into him?’
Lorenz leans back in his chair. ‘We’re looking at every possibility.’
‘You say Lottie is a smart kid,’ Bates says.
‘Sheis. She didn’t wander off or get lost. She’d never have gone near the water. And she’s not the kind of kid to be fooled by stories about lost puppies. Someonetookher.’
‘A stranger?’
‘Obviously!’
‘See, this is what confuses me,’ Bates says. ‘Lottie disappeared into thin air in the middle of a wedding, and yetno oneseems to have noticed. No one saw anything, no one heard anything.’
Blood roars in my ears. Suddenly I understand what she’s saying, the realisation slamming into my stomach with the speed and force of a train.
If a stranger had snatched Lottie by force in broad daylight it would have attracted huge attention. My daughter may be only three, but just getting her into her car seat is like wrestling with an alligator. She’d have screamed, lashed out, created such a scene no one could have ignored it.
Abducting her from the reception under cover of darkness and loud music might have been easier. But access would have been far more difficult. The beach is public, but the reception area by the pool was restricted to wedding guests, enforced by hotel security. And the lack of any photographs or genuine sightings of my daughter at the reception lends weight to the theory that she never came back to the hotel.
‘It’s possible she left the beach under her own steam, of course,’ Bates muses. ‘But if not, it seems more plausible to me that she was with someone she knew and trusted.’
I don’t know if that makes it worse.
‘Wewillfind her,’ Bates says.